Imaginary Worlds

I was blown away by the Netflix animated series Blue Eye Samurai. I’m not alone, it has 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the supervising director and producer of the show, Jane Wu, began her career as an animation storyboard artist. In fact, we were working at different animation studios at the same time in L.A. We talk about why she took a live action approac...

In the 1960s, Ursula K. le Guin represented a changing of the guard in science fiction literature. She was part of a generation of novelists who questioned the colonist mindset which had influenced American sci-fi for most of the 20th century. Le Guin came to this understanding not just as a moral stance or an intellectual exercise. Issues of racism and colonialism were personal to her. This episo...

This week's episode is an original audio drama. In previous episodes, I’ve interviewed Captain Hook, vampires, colonists on the moon, and H.P. Lovecraft’s brain in a jar -- or at least actors playing those characters. Now I’ve expanded my roster of fictional interviews to include iconic characters from Christmas tales. In this 21st century holiday tale, I am visited by supernatural entities who wa...

In honor of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, I’ve rewritten my 2018 episode about Doctor Who with updates on how the series has evolved, and new insights I’ve had about Doctor Who since I made this episode -- and since The Doctor has become one of my favorite characters. Media critic Emmet Asher-Perrin discusses how the history of The Doctor’s regenerations over 60 years is a story about an alien be...

One Piece is one of the biggest franchises in the world. The manga and anime have broken records in sales and viewership. The live action adaptation on Netflix was a hit. And the series holds a special place among fans who feel like they’re part of the Straw Hat pirate crew. But it may be the tragic backstories of the characters which tie it all together. I talk with co-host of the One Piece podca...

My guests from the previous episode, Carolyne Larrington and Ada Palmer, had so many interesting things to say about Norse mythology and how much of it is still a mystery to us, I decided to compile sections of their interviews in this bonus episode of outtakes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thor and Loki have become pop culture icons thanks to Marvel. But the influence of Norse mythology on contemporary fantasy runs through Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and so much more. University of Chicago professor and author Ada Palmer explains how people misunderstood Norse mythology for centuries, and why it’s so hard to capture the mindset of the Vikings in pop culture. And I talk with U...

Kritika H. Rao, Shveta Thakrar, Roshani Chokshi, and Ram V are helping to create a new genre. They use elements of their Hindu backgrounds to write fantasy books primarily aimed at a Western marketplace. I talked with them about the challenge of drawing on a diverse religion of beliefs and gods that many Western readers and publishers might be unfamiliar with. Our panel discussion also turned out...

We all know the scenario. A nice young family moves into a new house. It’s haunted by an evil spirit. Mayhem ensues. These movies have been reliable box office hits for decades, but they might also be telling us something about the real anxieties of home ownership. I talk with Alexandra West, co-host of the podcast Faculty of Horror, and Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Haunted Homes, about how the hi...

John Roesch is a legend in the field of foley sound effects. He mastered the art of creating bespoke sound effects using props or just his body on films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Back to the Future, Frozen, Toy Story, The Matrix, The Dark Knight, Inception, and much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And John was at the forefront of a revolution in foley sound effects starting with his wo...

35 years ago, Doug Naylor co-created a sitcom called Red Dwarf about the last human left alive in the far future. But the character is not alone. The rest of the crew aboard the ship Red Dwarf includes an annoying hologram, a very helpful android, a very unhelpful A.I. and a cat-person with a great sense of style. The show was considered a huge gamble back then. Sci-fi and comedy were not supposed...

The writers’ and actors’ strikes have disrupted the pipeline of new shows and movies. We’re going to run out of new stuff to watch soon. Our listeners can help with that. They want you know about their favorite unsung gems of sci-fi and fantasy. Some of them were cult hits. Others underperformed at the box office or in the ratings. Maybe it’s time to give them a chance. In this episode, we hear ab...

We’ve all had this experience. We get hooked on a show. We fall in love with the characters. We can’t stop thinking about them in between episodes. Then it gets cancelled or rushed to conclusion. When that happens to a show, it can feel like a relationship has abruptly ended – and a lot of them have ended in recent years. The streaming boom has gone bust. A lot of streaming services invested in sc...

Who wouldn’t want a fairy godmother to solve our problems with the flick of a magic wand? We know that’s not a healthy fantasy and yet, fairy godmothers aren’t going away. In fact, they’ve been proliferating in contemporary fantasy novels and reinterpretations of Cinderella. But they don’t look or act like you might expect. I talk with Butler University lecturer Jeana Jorgensen and PhD student Abi...

These ships feel like old friends – The Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, The Rosinante. But would any of them actually work in space? I talk with NASA astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen, JPL planetary scientist Kevin Hand and Boeing engineer Eric Primm talk about how we would get to the stars, what those ships would actually look like, why the Millennium Falcon pr...

Science fiction has primed us for this moment when artificial intelligence starts to take on a life of its own. ChatGPT has baffled and surprised even computer scientists in terms of how it works. Now a lot of us are asking, “Which movie are we in?” Is ChatGPT going to be a benign intelligence like Samantha from Her, dangerously neurotic and emotionally unstable like HAL from 2001, or a malevolent...

As the Warhammer franchise reaches its 40th anniversary, the company Games Workshop’s stated goal of “total global domination” is going swimmingly. But there’s one person who hasn’t gotten swept up in the war of miniature game pieces: me. I go to a Warhammer 40K tournament at The Brooklyn Strategist to learn why this tabletop role-playing game is so beloved and addictive. And I talk with game desi...

Our culture is going through a Gothic Revival -- partly thanks to the influence of Tim Burton. Gothic literature may have thrived in the 19th century (and my high school English class) but a lot of contemporary writers are returning to the tradition, creating stories that reimagine the past or look at the present through a Gothic lens. I talk with Xavier Aldana Reyes of the Manchester Centre for G...

A play by Charles Dickens. The Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. A hologram of a famous dead pop singer. They’re all connected by a simple magic trick called Pepper’s Ghost. What’s most remarkable about this illusion is that it hasn’t changed much in over 160 years. I talk with Jim Steinmeyer and Ben Schrader, both designers of theatrical special effects, about why a Victorian magic trick is mor...

When Jim Henson hired Bonnie Erickson to design Muppets in the early 1970s, Bonnie had no idea this experimental project they were working on – a prime time TV show with puppets – would evolve into the cultural phenomenon of The Muppet Show. I talked with Bonnie about how the crew tried several one-off specials where they figured out who the main characters would be, what they’d look like, and wha...

This summer, Hayao Miyazaki will be releasing his final animated film before retiring. Environmental stewardship has been a consistent theme throughout his work, from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away to Princess Mononoke. But what exactly has he been saying all this time about our relationship to the natural world? I gather a panel of experts to discuss the worlds that Miyazaki creates, and how...

Discworld might be the most popular fantasy series you’ve never heard of. The late Terry Pratchett wrote 41 novels in the Discworld universe. To honor the 75th anniversary of his birth, we look at what fueled his satire, how he put himself into his characters, and why so many Discworld fans find solace and inspiration in his worldview. I talk with Pratchett’s former assistant and biographer Rob Wi...

Margaret Cavendish was a pioneer of modern science fiction – except she didn’t intend to write science fiction. In the 17th century, Cavendish was a noblewoman who wanted to be taken seriously as a philosopher. In her poetry and her landmark work, The Blazing World, she imagined parallel universes, microscopic cities, human animal hybrids, zombie armies and flying vehicles. I talk with professors...

When the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales hit newsstands, many people didn’t know what to make of this new magazine. But 100 years later, Weird Tales has had a huge influence on modern day sci-fi, fantasy and horror. I talk with authors John Locke and Will Murray, former Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer, current Weird Tales editor Jonathan Maberry, and art collector Steve Korshak about how a s...

The town of Ong's Hat in New Jersey may have been the site of a top secret experiment that brought scientists to a parallel world in another dimension. Or it's the subject of a big inside joke and perhaps the first alternate reality game on the Internet. This week’s episode comes from the Slate podcast Decoder Ring, where the host Willa Paskin explores questions that have haunted me for a long tim...